Everything Didi Taihuttu Had, and Then Didn’t

A 39-year-old Dutch entrepreneur named Didi Taihuttu sold his house and his three cars in 2017 and converted the proceeds into Bitcoin. He moved his family to Thailand. By the time anyone was documenting him, his wealth had multiplied fivefold. The bet had come in. He was a millionaire, living in a country that wasn’t his, having voluntarily dismantled the life he’d spent decades assembling.

The Arte documentary The Bitcoin Millionaires follows people like Taihuttu—true believers who didn’t hedge with a small speculative position but committed everything, staking their actual existences on the conviction that money itself was about to change and that timing was the only thing that mattered. Some of them were right. The documentary is honest enough to show the ones who weren’t.

The money part isn’t really the subject, though. What drives all of these people is an older fantasy: escape. The house, the cars, the career, the mortgage, the slow accumulation of small obligations that constitute a normal life—that’s what they were actually betting against. Ethereum and Ripple and Stellar were just the mechanism. For a brief and genuinely strange window in 2017, the financial system appeared to reward that kind of recklessness at scale, and a specific type of person who had always believed the rules were optional suddenly looked like a prophet. Whether Taihuttu is lucky or prescient probably depends on when you’re reading this.